The Malacia Tapestry Read Online Free Page A

the great square, clustering particularly under the colonnade of the Old Customs House, were booths for less serious-minded personages and children, where one might view two-headed calves, dioramas of ancient time, animated human skeletons, oriental jugglers, live ancestral animals, snake-charmers from Baghdad, fortune-tellers, marionettes, gaudy magic-lantern shows, and performing shaggy-tusks no bigger than dogs.
    How I had hung about those enchanted booths with my sister Katarina as a child. The magic-lantern shows, with their panoramas of shipwreck, noble life and majestic scenery, had been our especial delight. Here they still were, unchanged.
    What was unusual about this day was that it was the first Thursday of the month, the day set since time immemorial for the Malacian Supreme Council to meet. Not that the affairs of those greypates concerned me, but older people took an interest. I heard them murmuring about the Council as I walked among them.
    Bishop Gondale IX blessed the Council in public, but the deliberations of the Council were held in secret. The results of those deliberations were never announced; one could only deduce what had happened by observing who disappeared into the capacious dungeons of Fetter Place, there to be strangled by capable hands, or who was beheaded in the public gaze between the great bronze statues of Desport’s slobbergobs in St Marco, by the cathedral, or who reappeared as piecemeal chunks about various quarters of the city, or who was found with his mouth nibbled away by pike in the whirlpools of the River Toi. If the Council saw fit to despatch them, then they were troublemakers, and I for one was glad to know that everything worked so well for the contentment of our citizens. The immemorial duty of the Supreme Council was to protect Malacia from change.
    I found a hair in my mouth. Removing it from between my teeth, I saw it was golden and curly. Ah, the Supreme Council could drown all its citizens in the canal, if so be I might get near enough to La Singla to pasture on that same little mountain.
    The traders at their stalls were discreet, knowing well the system of informers which helped maintain the peace of Malacia, but I gathered from a couple of them that the Council might be discussing Hoytola’s hydrogenous balloon, to decide whether or not it could be approved. Nobody understood the principle of this novel machine, but some magical property in that phrase, ‘Hoytola’s hydrogenous balloon’, had given it a certain lifting power in the taverns at least. The reality had yet to be seen; it was the Council which had ultimate say on such possibilities.
    One of the traders, a tallowy man with blue jowls and the same innocent look as the dead geese in his basket, said, ‘I reckon the balloon should be allowed to fly. Then we’ll be the equal of the flighted men, won’t we?’
    â€˜All that’s interesting happens on the ground,’ I said. ‘Heroes, husbands, heretics – leave the air to sun and spirits.’
    I knew nothing of Hoytola. The sending up of small hot-air balloons had been a child’s pursuit in Malacia for ages. I remembered my father ponderously explaining how a whole fleet of hot-air balloons tied together might transport an army to surprise the Ottoman enemy. He had had a pamphlet printed concerning it. Then a captain in the Militia had called on him and dissuaded him from taking further interest in current affairs.
    It was enough that there were flighted people not greatly different from us, except for wings. They talked our language, married, died of the plague, much as we. Three of them soared above the square as I strolled through it, to settle by their cote at the top of St Marco’s campanile, traditional eyrie of these traditional sentinels of Malacia.
    I was hailed several times by stall-keepers as I went by. They had been groundlings when I performed here or there, and still cherished my